Yummy Petits Pains

SO I'm trying again ... meanwhile I'm having freshly baked hot bread (that I buy as a risen dough and bung in the oven) ... and lovely coffee ...

And that's about all I have to say today. Cheerio!

Here's Madonna claiming she would have done more for Michael Jackson ... if only ..(??!?) ... do you believe this..??

I mean, what COULD she or "we" have done ..?

Sorry about the spanische Untertitel ...

Stung by the Killer B

YET AGAIN: what's new?

In recent times I have shied away from detailing my drugs use in blow-by-blow type accounts. Or for that matter my endless resolutions to quit ~ and then the inevitable "lapses". They seem to exasperate y'all too much.

In the past I only managed to stop for a few days at a time and I only achieved that by either spending all my money, or keeping it in a post office that closes at 5:30 pm ~ and I don't have a cashcard.

But that method of "quitting" if you want to call it that ~ can only ever score me a few days off.

Because as surely as night follows day Monday morning comes round again. And then the itch to use becomes all-consuming. And heroin always feels better after a few days off, even if I have held myself on a heavy dose of methadone in-between. Despite what the doctors seem to say ~ and I can only speak for myself ~ methadone simply does not sate the old receptor sites anything like as effectively as heroin. Even at doses over 100mg a day. I think if the drugs services and medical profession sincerely wanted to crack heroin addiction (and I'm not convinced they truly do ~ a lot of them are content merely to turn up and get paid...) then they want to look away from methadone-methadone-methadone. Opiate addiction can in theory be treated with any of the scores of opiates and opioids licensed to relieve pain.

Having said that I do feel "OK" on methadone. Just nowhere near as OK as on heroin.

Heroin ~ heroin. A hard nasty drug. I can barely believe I'm writing this.

This morning I was perusing the Oxford University prospectus; this afternoon I took home a "10B" ~ that is, a fifth of a gram, a £10 bag of brown heroin ~ and then spent a good two hours unconscious in a chair. (That's what heroin does to me these days ~ either pretty much nothing, or else I'm knocked out cold ...)

I'm not willing to wait however many years until some miracle treatment makes quitting as easy as a goodly part of my would like it to be. Quitting is always possible if you want it sincerely enough. If you are determined enough. In decades past many people came off cold turkey. It was the only way out available to them.

I tried "'clucking' it out" ~ I did eight days clean, nearly lost my mind (I was acting very out of character ~ and in my parents' house). I'd never willingly do that again ...

But methadone is there for me. I'm already on a script. I'm lucky.

What's that saying? Nothing that's truly worth achieving has ever been easy~? Something like that. I would title the German translation of my still (possibly) forthcoming addict memoirs Mein Kampf ~ which means My Fight ~ for surely giving up hard drugs can only be a fight and a big fight at that ~ even with methadone... if only that title hadn't long ago been appropriated by a certain Herr Hitler ..(!)

So: tomorrow is another day. Tomorrow I pick up more methadone from my friendly pharmacist. Tomorrow I try again.

Illustrated: the evil killer B ("B" means brown heroin); syringe selection (I dread to think what kind of druggie would use the 60ml one to the far left ~ I could fit £20 of drugs into 1ml ...); Oxford Uni logo; "Bridge of Sighs", Hertford College, Oxford; a fight ~ not of the kind I'm destined for ...

A Big Day Out

INSTEAD OF DOING THE USUAL thing I inevitably find myself doing on Monday morning, I got up late and ventured to Central London in a hunt for German magazines.

I got off the tube at St Pancras International, where you get the Eurostar train to Paris and Brussels. St Pancras is surely the most beautiful station building in London if not Britain:



I found Der Spiegel and Stern on a newsstand outside. The hubbub of French voices drew me into the hi-tech inner hall where screens displaying 13:28 Paris Nord set off a frisson of excitement and longing inside me. It's been such a long time since I travelled anywhere at all except just down the road...



The last time I saw a newsstand with a half-decent selection was near Baker Street tube. Baker Street of course being famous for Sherlock Holmes... Madame Tussuad's museum is right by the tube station so the place is thronging with tourists (unlike in this snap!)...



Madame Tussauds is next to the Planetarium:



I picked up a weekly Take-a-Break -style magazine called Freizeit Revue. It is an old woman's magazine but I bought it for the endless crossword puzzles sandwiched next to advertisements for piles ointments and surgical support stockings ...

Then I meandered down to Regents' Park which is a Royal Park and so extremely well manicured.



The houses overlooking the vast greens are pretty impressive too ...



... then it was nearly rush hour so I had to fly home before the trains were too crammed to breathe.

And there we are! My first day out in London-London in over a year!

*******

Have a look at the arrogant French woman in the bottom clip ~ this is absolute classic telly!!

THE LATE, GREAT KEITH FLOYD was one of the most classic TV cooks of all time. There was a retrospective on his life and work on TV last night and these were the best clips shown:

Here from his best series Floyd On France, is his attempt at a mushroom omelette ~ with "angry dragon lady" "simmering" behind ...



And here's the most classic clip of all. This wasn't a set-up ~ the French-Basque lady was for real! "FLOYD CAN'T COOK!"

A Brave New World ...

DRUG-FREE and frightening ...


I am making yet another attempt at living completely heroin-free. I failed before because I didn't know how to do it. Now I have better ideas. For one thing, because I'm miserable without that in my system, no matter how much methadone I take, I came to the conclusion I somehow have to learn to enjoy misery. How on earth I shall manage that I don't know.

I don't want to go on injecting all my life. My veins have run out and unless I want to go in the femoral (crook of the thigh) or jugular (neck) I really have run out of options. Sticking needles in the feet and the veins still blowing is unspeakably horrible. And it makes me feel like a desperate, desperate junkie.

Well I think I passed one test today: as I walked out here I spied a dealer ambulating down the other side of the street. In previous times I'd have called out, coughed up all my money and promised to settle the balance (because I didn't have £10 on me) tomorrow. And I didn't. Of course I was rewinding this over and over my head for the next half hour ... but, y'know... one step at a time ...

PS Tiny trotterdonkeys of the deep... Yesterday's seahorses post now has the videos I omitted to add: see the very end of it.

... But here's perhaps the oddest looking seahorse of them all: the East Asian Dragon Seahorse, filmed here in Singapore Sea Life Centre:



PPS Good luck to all Germans on today's elections. You'll need it...

Seahorses!

TINY DONKEYS OF THE DEEP...

A MYSTERIOUS FRIDAY ON SATURDAY POST...

These mystery critters of the seas are like artefacts from a wild dream.

There are 47 species of seahorses ~ genus hippocampus ~ worldwide.

Dwarf seahorses are only about an inch (2.5cm) long. The largest seahorses are the Central American 30cm/ 1 foot-long Hippocampus ingens.




Seahorses are usually found in warm tropical and subtropical shallow reef-waters.

Seahorses are weak but incredibly graceful swimmers who seem to glide upright through the water. They cannot survive strong currents and require plenty of seaweed, reeds or other vegetation to hang on to.

This see how tiny this pygmy seahorse is compared to the plants:

Some species have the most incredible coloration, like this ghostly individual:



Others are camouflaged incredibly well:



See how sharply Denise's pygmy seahorse (Hippocampus denise) from the Western Pacific contrasts against this neutral background... more like a clay-modelled figure than a real-life trotterdonkey of the deep:





Seahorses are unique among creatures in that the males give birth and can carry newborn babies in a pouch.











Look at these psychedelic youngsters:



... and these tiny stragglers ...



These are the videos I forgot to put on yesterday:

Diver meets wild seahorse. See what I mean about a dream-artefact...?



2: Seahorses found in River Thames:




... Have a cheery weekend, y'all!

Google Translate Ain't That Bad

THIS is what Google Translate made of "Cleaner Dispatches Robbers With Mopwater" from Bild yesterday:

(The newspaper's title "BILD" means "picture" or "image".)

NEW FROM IMAGE: housekeeper chased robbers with dirty water

Berlin ~ Clean! With her mop bucket had a cleaner in a Berlin arcade two robbers hunted. The men had penetrated beyond the opening times in the salon, the 50-year-old had been threatened with a knife and demanded money. But the woman responded presence of mind: She picked up her mop bucket and poured one of the robbers, the dirty water over his head. Both culprits then fled without any loot.

Multimillion-Pound Anglo Saxon Treasure Find!

FROM THE SUN:

THE biggest-ever hard of Anglo-Saxon gold has been found in a farm field ~ by a bloke using an old metal detector bought for £2.50 at a car boot sale.

The collection of gleaming artefacts ~ thought to have belonged to 7th-Century royalty ~ is worth MILLIONS.

Containing around 5kg of gold {from Byzantium} and 2.5kg of silver {including Sri Lankan garnets}, it is made up of around 1,500 gem-encrusted items including parts of swords, helmets, strips of precious metal and biblical inscriptions and trinkets believed to be trophies taken after battles. The hoard ~ officially declared teasure by a coroner yesterday ~ was found by Terry Herbert, 55, just under the surface of a ploughed field in Brownhills, West Mids.

He said: "Imagine you're at home and somebody keeps putting money through your letterbox. That's what it was like.

"As soon as I closed my eyes I was seeing gold patterns. I didn't think it was ever going to end. I just kept on thinking of what I might find the next day."

The collection ~ dubbed the Staffordshire Hoard ~ eclipses the famous Sutton Hoo find of 1939, when 1.7kg of gold was dug up from an Anglo-Saxon burial ground near Woodbridge, Suffolk.

Eager archaeologists moved in after Terry's initial discovery to help uncover the entire haul.

It may take more than a year to value and experts will probably argue about its origins for decades.

One of the most intriguing items is a strip of gold bearing a warlike Latin inscription from the Old Testament.

It translates as "Rise up, O Lord, and may thy enemies be dispersed and those who hate thee be driven from thy face."

Under a 1996 law, owndership of such a find switches to the State once it is declared treasure.

But there is likely to be a substantial reward shared between Terry ~ who lives on disability benefits with his three cats ~ and farm owner Fred Johnson.

Mr Johnson said: "We've had eight people from a metal detector club searching the land over the years. They must be kicking themselves because they couldn't find a thing."

Three bodies want to acquire the treasure once it is valued ~ the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent, Birmingham Museum Art Gallery and Staffordshire County Council.



Man Strikes Gold with Record Haul Report from Yesterday's Sun

Daily Mirror Saxon Hoard report ...

ITN VIDEO:





DOG VS LOBSTERS
Ignore the first 45 seconds of some man gabbling to camera. Some people are in love with the idea of being internet TV stars. After about 40 seconds the first lobster comes onscreen. Such a disgusting piece of sea-vermin I have never seen and how on earth anyone can EAT such a stalk-eyed scavenger I've absolutely no idea ... But have a look; this is really entertaining ...



NEW FROM BILD: Putzfrau verjagt Räuber mit Dreckwasser

Berlin ~ Sauber! Mit ihrem Putzeimer had eine Reinigungskraft in einer Berliner Spielhalle zwei Räuber bejagt. Die Männer waren außerhalb der Öffnungszeiten in den Salon eingedrungen, hatten die 50-Jährige mit einem Messer bedroht und Geld gefordert. Doch die Frau reagierte geistesgegenwärtig: Sie nahm ihren Putzeimer und schüttete einem der Räuber das Dreckwasser über den Kopf. Daraufhin flüchteten beide Täter ohne Beute.

Cleaner Drives Out Robbers With Mopwater!

Berlin ~ clean! A cleaning lady dispatched two robbers from an amusement arcade with her bucket. The men broke in after closing time, threatened the 50-year-old with a knife and demanded money. The quickwitted cleaner grabbed her bucket and doused one robber over the head with dirty water. The pair fled with no loot.



PS MERLE ~ just for you. I couldn't find "Mother Shelling Peas" as exhibited in the Tate Gallery, London, so this photo is just for you ...


... + as you can see, though I never found the London "Mother Shelling Peas" here's a painting from the Australian national collection by Frederick McCubbin entitled "Shelling Peas" ... it's in the National Gallerry, Melbourne ...

Porkshire Trotettes Recipe and a Disney Dog

I REALLY WANT A DISNEY DOG LIKE "PEANUT" FROM THE KINGSMILL ADVERT:

Can you believe NOBODY has put Peanut the dog on Youtube? You have to click here, and you can see him in all his Disney cuteness ... scrabbling at the window because his cruel owers have blamed sandwich theft upon him ... poor swine ...

But if you're too lazy to click, here's a doggie just like Peanut the Kingsmill dog being tormented by a nasty biscuit-eating child:



HERE'S THE RECIPE FOR MY YORKSHIRE TROTETTES:

Trotettes are simple: get Iceland's own precooked Yorkshire puddings (the type with batter already risen).

Cook beef/lamb, cauliflower/broccoli cheese, vegetables, gravy.

Slam in Yorkshire puddings for last 5 mins.



FROM GERMANY'S BILDZEITUNG:

Hornissen attackieren Schulklasse

Haßloch ~ Eine Schulklasse unternahm in Hassloch (Rheinland-Pfalz) einen Ausflug, ging in einen Wald. Plötzlich fiel dort ein Schwarm aufgeregter Hornissen über die Kinder her ~ offenbar waren sie dem Bau zu nahe gekommen. Drei Schüler, die Lehrerin (30) und ein Jogger (51) wurden durch Stiche verletzt, mußten ins Krankenhaus. Der Förster schaffte den Hornissenbau vom Waldweg fort.

German tabloid style is a little different from the English, so I cleared it up as best I could without straying too far from a literal translation:

HORNETS ATTACK SCHOOLCHILDREN

Hassloch ~ a school class went on a woodland walk in Hassloch (Rheinland-Pfalz). Suddenly a swarm of angry hornets attacked the children, who had obviously strayed too near the insects' nest. Three pupils, the teacher (30) and a passing jogger (51) have been treated in hospital for stings. Forest management removed the nest.

From Bild.de: Horror-Wespen-Report

More from Bild: Wespen-Invasion: Gefahr für Millionen

ä Ä ö Ö ü Ü ß ... How to type German umlauts ...

Yorkshire Trotettes in Oven

MY YORKSHIRE TROTETTES are in the oven, I am on page 75 of my book, meaning I have now have over 1050 words listed in my notebook (though my vocabulary is so retarted I had to look up many of them 5 or more times ...) I had a good flick through the medium wave band last night and was surprised to find half the stations broadcasting in German and Dutch (Brits don't listen to AM radio any more). A station called NDR has been reading me the news etc.

Things are going from bad to worse with Maple Syrup my druggieworker. She still appears to believe I can be bullied into doing things. I deal with her by saying yes yes and agreeing to whatever she's banging on about ~ so I can get out of there as quickly as possible. Then doing absolutely nothing about it. I really want to change worker.

And that's about it. I'm sending off for the Free University Berlin prospectus. Surely the EU has funds for waster old drug addict would-be international students like me..? Well you gotta have some goal, even if it is totally half-baked ...

Illustrated: Yorkshire (batter) puddings. Stuffed, these are turned into my own special "Yorkshire Trotettes" ...

Here's the link for students wishing to "major" in German language and literature in German at Berlin Free Uni (wouldn't want to be outside Berlin, would you??)

Japanese Studies ("Japanologie") at the same institution ...

PS re "philology"/Philologie I stand corrected. Philology does indeed mean the study of language and literature in English as well as German. I had believed "philology" was just an oldfashioned word for linguistics, having been thrown off course by a fascinating tome on comparative linguistics entitled Comparative Philology ~ that I found on the shelves of a Welsh holiday cottage in Amroth, of all places ...

A Very Pleasant "Repast"... And More Cockroaches

I HAVE JUST SPENT £4.50 on the strongest cockroach spray I could find. Yes I am (of necessity) an expert on the various domestic insecticides and their relative dosages and potencies. Yes: the plague has come back. In fact I have a horrible suspicion I have now encountered a third species of roach (under my fridge) ~ the beetle-sized oriental cockroach! Horrible things. The last lot of ant powder just lays around looking grey and ashy, but does not seem to exterminate, even when they're covered in it. My two cans of tropical-strength Raid have run out so I had to buy Rentokill Insectrol which at 0.46% permethrin is more than double the strength of ordinary (UK-strength) Raid. And I should think so too at £4.50 a not-very-big can!

The "repast" was really nice. I've conjured up a new dish called Yorkshire trotettes. I'ts basically industrial style yorkshire puddings stuffed with roast lamb or beef and seasonable vegetables and it's very nice especially when you made six of them that you only remember at 4:30am. They make a brilliant midnight feast.

Maple Syrup my druggieworker, who says I should go on a proper language course (for Spanish) was even suggesting I do a DEGREE. I'm not so sure of that. But I did start looking into studying German IN Germany (why on earth do a course in German in LONDON? Makes no sense to me, not if you are free to travel... I spent a lot of the afternoon pouring over the Freie Universität Berlin's online "startseite". See my German ain't that good: for I thought Deutsche Philologie meant German linguistics. Apparently Philologie doesn't just mean "philology" it means "the study of language and literature" ... They even do Japanese there ... hmmm.

And just to lower the tone I had a poke through a selection of hens' teeth ~ sorry foreign language periodicals ~ you can't get them round here. And walked off with Bild ~ Europe's biggest-selling newspaper (apparently). With a 5,000,000-a-day circulation in the 1980s and 4,000,000 a day until 2002, it now sells a shamefull 3.8 million examplares pro jour... Have a click here and see why.

Sorry for such a boring post... even I'm bored today ...

Illustrated: Rentokil Insectrol; Freie Universität Berlin's 1960s-style main entrance ...

Nonindustrial Beef (and Lamb) ...

OK, having been inspired by Iceland's "industrial" version, I finally got inspired to do my own roast beef dinner at the weekend. I say "roast": it was pie-steak cooked in covered pan on hob. Basically beef hotpot with only mushrooms and onions. The dumplings I put in last thickened the juices into gravy very nicely. To season I used about 1 teaspoon Chinese curry powder; 1 teaspoon Jamaican jerk seasoning; 4 teaspoons paprika; 1 teaspoon thyme; 1 teaspoon honey-mustard (which is annoyingly nearly empty as I ate nearly an entire jar one night when I was bored ...). Seal in beef cubes by frying. Add boiling water. Chop up and chuck on two very large mushrooms (priced the same as cheapie button ones for some reason by Morrisons express checkout) plus half a giant onion. Add all seasoning at once. Boil for about 20 mins. Reduce heat to minimum. Cover pan. Let simmer for another two hours. Then the beef, which was "edible" in 20 mins but with the texture of old shoes, has turned into an olde English feast. Serve with Iceland industrial cauliflower and broccoli cheese, peas, beans and potato croquettes. Yummy.

I bought about an "lb" (or 450g) of lamb necks ~ some poor dear furry's been slaughtered and I'm buying cross-sections of the poor swine's neck!! Except if it literally was a swine I wouldn't touch it in a million years. Pork is utterly unclean.

Anyway, I fried this up in a wok to seal in, chucked in a pan of boiling water to which I added about half the same spices as yesterday but far more herbs: 1 tsp standard mixed herbs and about five sprigs of fresh mint, stripped off the stalk with a sharp knife and roughly chopped. I also threw in about 1 teaspoon of brown sauce (which is like tomato ketchup with Lea & Perrins ~ full of tamarinds) and 1 teaspoon honey-mustard. In the wok I meanwhile fried up two handsful of baby button mushrooms (got 'em from a different shop where they were cheaper) and the other half of that giant Spanish onion.

Then I took two enormous bags of clothes to the launderette, where they would only fit in the £3.60 machine and cost £1.20 to get even half dry. They're now finishing off on my luxury Ikea hanger...

... anyway I got back after midday and my kitchen smelled like Nanny's used to (and she was just like Mrs Bridges off Upstairs Downstairs ~ and she had been "in service" as a girl ...) on Sunday afternoons... I've not had nowt to eat yet, but on tasting, the water the lamb was cooking in was very nice indeed ...

Another Upstairs Downstairs link

Did you know in the early 1970s Upstairs Downstairs was said to be the Queen's favourite television programme, and Mrs Bridges (my Nan) her favourite character ...